BOOKS THREAD

I just finished "The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time" by Michael Craig. It details a serious of poker games between Dallas billionaire Andy Beal and a group of the biggest cash game poker players. Beal put up $10 million, the poker players pooled their money to match it and then selected one player at a time to play heads-up hold'em against Beal. The book really pulls the curtain off the world of big-money poker.

And I'll third or fourth "The Odds" by Millman. I read it years ago as a new release. It was a great book about big money gamblers and the grinders who are just trying to make ends meet in Vegas.

I'm anxiously awaiting "The Tender Bar: A Memoir" by J.R. Moehringer to arrive. I've heard absolutely nothing but good things about that book.

 

I recently read:

1. the new Harry Potter - 2 thumbs up, although I didn't find it to be as much of a page turner as the previous ones. I was able to put it down and not want to pick it back up immediately.

2. The Secret Man - I've been a bit of a Watergate buff since I was little, but didn't find this as compelling as I had hoped.

3. 102 Minutes - wow. This might have been the scariest book I've ever read. Someone mentioned it upthread, but to reiterate, this is the story of the 102 minutes from when the first plane hit the World Trade Center until the 2nd tower collapsed. It includes stories of people who survived, people who didn't, firefighters, police, etc. Really, really harrowing. Despite the difficult material, I had a very hard time putting this one down.

I don't think this book has been mentioned before, but I highly recommend Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole Leblanc. This summary from Publishers Weekly sums is up pretty well:

Politicians rail about welfare queens, crack babies and deadbeat dads, but what do they know about the real struggle it takes to survive being poor? Journalist LeBlanc spent some 10 years researching and interviewing one extended family-mother Lourdes, daughter Jessica, daughter-in-law Coco and all their boyfriends, children and in-laws-from the Bronx to Troy, N.Y., in and out of public housing, emergency rooms, prisons and courtrooms. LeBlanc's close listening produced this extraordinary book, a rare look at the world from the subjects' point of view. Readers learn that prison is just an extension of the neighborhood, a place most men enter and a rare few leave. They learn the realities of welfare: the myriad of misdemeanors that trigger reduction or termination of benefits, only compounding a desperate situation. They see teenaged drug dealers with incredible organizational and financial skills, 13-year-old girls having babies to keep their boyfriends interested, older women reminiscing about the "heavenly time" they spent in a public hospital's psychiatric ward and incarcerated men who find life's first peace and quiet in solitary confinement. More than anything, LeBlanc shows how demanding poverty is. Her prose is plain and unsentimental, blessedly jargon-free, and includidng street talk only when one of her subjects wants to "conversate." This fine work deserves attention from policy makers and general readers alike.

Next up for me: 1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and maybe a re-read of All the President's Men.

 

Just finished "Blue Blood" by Edward Conlon, a Harvard-educated NYPD cop/detective. A little wordy, but a good read.

And The Godfather Returns was simply awful. Piazza at first base awful.

 

I read Blue Blood a few weeks ago. Enjoyed it.

I recently read Carl Hiassen's Skinny Dip. Not as good as some of his previous books, but still an entertaining and funny read.

 

Another thumb up for Blue Blood. Was a birthday present from the ABF (Adorable Boy Friend) this year and enjoyed it very much.

 

I think it was Lisa, I'm not sure, who wanted to know what I thought about 'The Historian.'
I really enjoyed it.
It was oddly suspenseful. I say oddly because looking back, it probably shouldn't have been. Her approach is really difficult to pull of, but she makes it work.
The layering time frames works.
The weirdly proper, almost Victorian or Edwardian civility of the writing works.
And the epistelary-diary format is great because it's so reminiscent of Stoker.

 

It's a piece of literary genius, the jealous haters and their Hatorade be damned. And it will be copied, and copied, and copied forever. /John Doe from Se7en/

 

Someone a bit earlier mentioned In Harm's Way about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. There was a novel, from several years ago, by Thomas Fleming that's a historical fiction dealing with that very incident. It's called Time and Tide and it's a fictional account of the USS Jefferson City from the Battle of Savo Island (in 1942) to the end of the war. Very good read, in my mind, and parts of it rang true 45 years later when I joined the Navy, especially the part about the love and pride you feel for your shipmates and the ship on which you serve.

A much older book which is a good read but has kind of a hokey ending is The President's Plane is Missing by Robert Serling. It's written from several perspectives, one of which is an old-time wire service boss. Still a decent road, though.

And two by Gorman Bechard, "Balls" and "The Second Greatest Story Ever Told" are pretty funny. Balls, especially, is good, because it chronicles the fictional story of Louise "Balls" Gehrig, the first female major leaguer. Good stuff.

Anyone read any of these older releases?

 

This book received great reviews, so I took it home. It lay on my floor for weeks, surrounded by mounds of other books which as soon as they passed through my door looked boring and uninteresting. Perhaps influenced by the other boring books, I continually passed over this one. Or perhaps it was because of the bad title and ugly cover.

At any rate, with no other books grabbing my attention, I gave this a chance. I read through the first 15 pages quickly as kind of a job interview. I was on the verge of throwing it down when for some reason at the last second I decided to give it a chance.

Thank god. What an amazing, out-of-nowhere book. Surprises abound. Brilliant lines pop out of nowhere. And there's a bit of Fight Clubbishness to the entire thing.

Read this book. I could see this being the next M. Night Shamalayan movie, because at the end you'll realize everything that came before wasn't what you thought.

 

Gottfried, Robert S. The Black Death, Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

What makes it work best is that it's actually structured like a great detective story: How an entire population of people could be at the mercy of rodent ecology.

Entirely fitting tableside reading.

 

Might be a good time to read "Rising Tide" John Barry's book about the Mississippi floods of the 1920s. Lot of levee talk in there, too.

 

Or Isaac's Storm, by Erik Larsen, author of Devil in the White City. It's an account of the 1906 Galveston hurricane, which until this week, was the worst in American history. He looks at it mostly through the eyes of a meteorologist who misread the path of the storm, thus becoming partly responsible for the 6,000 deaths. There's lots of good stuff in there, including a very scientific look at how a hurricane forms and how the 'cane allowed Houston to beat Galveston for the No. 1 city in eastern Texas.